The Vigilante's Bride (5 page)

Bart stormed down the walk to the empty buggy. He snatched the reins to Clete’s horse from his hands. “Gimme your horse. I’m riding. You take the buggy back.”

He toed the stirrup and sat himself hard in the saddle.

“But where’s Miss Emily?” Clete blurted, then jumped out of the way as Bart gigged the spurs into the animal’s hide. The horse snorted in pain and frogged a few steps sideways, then broke into a run, its mane and tail streaming.

Clete jumped up into the buggy. “We got trouble coming,” he muttered to the waiting men. “Giddap!” With a hard slap of the reins, he sent the horse and its big-wheeled little carriage racing out of the courtyard after Axel.

Luke jammed his hands into his pockets and wondered what to say to Emily now. Her face was white, her lips trembling. The scene in the parlor with Axel had upset her. Maybe it did some good. She’d seen for herself what kind of man Bart was. And yet Luke sensed anything else he said about Axel would be unwelcome right then.

“What time is it, Mr. Sullivan?” Emily asked.

He glanced at the grandfather clock on the stair landing behind her. With a flash of intuition he knew why she asked. If he hadn’t pulled her off the stage last night, she’d be married by now.

“Four thirty,” he said quietly, and kept his face blank. He swallowed the surge of anger in his throat. Bart had wanted to slap her. Luke saw it and wondered if she did, too.

“I suppose you expect an apology from me?” Her mouth had pulled into a thin straight line.

The question surprised him. While he didn’t expect her to throw her arms around him with gratitude, a thank-you would have been nice. “No. I took the money and I took you, though I had good reasons for doing both.”

She looked up at him and said nothing.

“You’ve seen him – you still want to marry him?”

The blood drained from her face, leaving the creamy ivory skin with a chalky cast. Lips tight together, she shook her head and turned away.

Children clattered up and down the staircase, shouting and pushing each other, getting ready to put on a play. The two young Crow boys ran by, dressed in bathrobes as wise men now, dish towels wound around their heads for turbans. In the doorway, one of the cooks straightened a homemade halo on a little blond angel. A loud scraping of chairs and moving of furniture came from the dining room, signaling something important was about to happen.

“Miss McCarthy, the children have a Christmas pageant planned. Shall we go inside?”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel like it now.”

“Neither do I, but we’re going to. These kids have practiced weeks for this. We’re gonna watch and we’re gonna clap.” With a little bow he crooked his arm out to her. “Take it, or do I carry you in over my shoulder?”

She shot him a look full of knives, snatched his arm, and stamped down the hall beside him.

His lips twitched.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1884

At two o’clock the next afternoon, Emily answered the doorbell and opened the front door. Feet planted, Sheriff Sam Tucker and his deputy stood on the porch.

Tucker, a tall, board-straight man who looked as if he never smiled, pinned her with a cold look. “And you must be Miss McCarthy from Chicago.”

Emily nodded, her face stretched tight. “Come in, Sheriff.

I’m Emily McCarthy. Molly and Luke are in the parlor. She told me you and Deputy Howard would be out today.”

Molly had also warned her to watch every word she said. Sam Tucker was smart and knew the law better than some judges. He’d never met Luke. When Sam came to Repton, Luke was up in Lewistown working for Mr. Stuart.

In the parlor, Deputy Howard wrinkled his nose and pulled a small notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket.

Tucker looked hard at Luke. “So you’re Luke Sullivan, are you? To my mind, you don’t look like a man who’d hold up a stage and kidnap a woman passenger off it.”

Luke kept his face blank. Not a hint of anger showed in his expression. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Sheriff, I never took a thing in my life that wasn’t mine. As for Miss McCarthy here, she was running down the road as fast as she could go when I came along.”

“I see,” Tucker said, in a tone which implied he did not. “Is that what happened, Miss McCarthy?”

When Emily hesitated and swallowed, Molly broke in quickly.

“I raised Luke Sullivan from a boy, and I don’t raise outlaws,” she said. “He’s a fine man who does what’s right, though
some people
might disagree.”

Emily shifted, uncomfortably aware that Molly was looking at her when she said that.

“It’s a puzzle all right, Miss McCarthy, why any holdup man would rob a stage, kidnap a woman, then set her down later on a cold, empty road and leave her out there. That don’t make sense. How long were you waiting before Mr. Sullivan rode up?”

“Not very long.”

“Did you ask him for a ride?”

“I didn’t have to. He offered – sort of.”

Deputy Howard tongued the pencil point, sniffed, and wrote something in his notebook.

The sheriff watched him write, then turned back to Emily. “And where exactly did you say Mr. Sullivan found you?”

“I was standing in the middle of the road.”

“Thought you were running.”

“I stopped when Mr. Sullivan rode up.” Which was the truth. Surely they didn’t put people in jail for telling the truth. She twisted her hands together and frowned at Luke.

Tucker narrowed his eyes and studied them both. “Was the stagecoach nearby?”

Quickly, she wet her lips. “It was dark. I couldn’t see.”

“The inside of a cat ain’t that dark, Miss McCarthy,” Tucker said softly. “A stagecoach is big and noisy, and that one had four horses. The man who kidnapped you – what did he look like?”

“I couldn’t tell that, either. He had a mask on.”

“And he never took it off – not once during the whole time?”

Tucker’s eyebrows flew up in pretended amazement. “Was he a big man, then? As big as Mr. Sullivan here, maybe?”

“It was too dark to see.”

Tucker nodded. “Did he talk like he was from around here, or was it too dark for you to tell that, either?”

Sullivan’s mouth twitched.

“Sheriff, I don’t know how people sound around here. I’m from Chicago.”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but did he . . . did he harm you?”

A hot flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. “No, he was a gentleman.”

“Begging your pardon again, ma’am, he was a thief.”

“Well, somebody raised him right,” she snapped.

“I thought we was gonna arrest him,” Deputy Howard said.

Sheriff Tucker looked over. “What for? Sullivan’s got a ironclad alibi with both women backing his story, including his victim. Nobody was hurt in that robbery, and most of the money is still in the satchel – which strikes me as downright odd. A lawyer – even a dumb one – would make me look like a fool in court.”

“He’s a cool one all right,” Howard said, and sniffed again.

“A little too cool, if you ask me. Ain’t you got a handkerchief?” Howard straightened a leg and pulled a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket. “He’s polite and speaks good. Don’t know as I believe he was with Stuart’s Stranglers.”

“Believe it,” Tucker clipped. “I knew what he was – maybe still is – the minute I saw him. Stuart’s group prides themselves on not looking like what they are.”

The bare hedge of Caragana pea trees, crowded together on the other side of the road as a windbreak, rustled as they passed. Their frozen seedpods, hard as wood now, clacked together whenever the wind skirled. A gust of snow alongside rattled the Caraganas.

Howard rubbed his nose. “I hate these blasted pea trees.”

“Let’s get this over with.” The sheriff touched his spurs to his horse and flicked the reins lightly. Howard did the same. At the gate to the main road, they turned left and headed toward Repton and the X-Bar-L ranch.

Tucker seamed his mouth shut. Axel wasn’t going to like this.

CHAPTER
5

Chief Black Otter listened to his young son, sitting with him before a fire in his lodge. A ragged ribbon of scar slashed a crescent from eyebrow to chin, a souvenir from a war party many years before, when a tough old Sioux warrior split Black Otter’s cheek open to the bone.

The soft white elk skin he wore was beaded with intricate designs, the leather fringe hanging from his sleeves nearly a foot long, a mark of status. Both moccasins and shirt glistened with embroidery of shiny red and yellow porcupine quills.

He’d been chief for twenty years, a fighting chief, and when he chose to wear it, his war bonnet hung below his hips. Black Otter stroked his upper lip thoughtfully, listening to Two Leggings telling him about the school, about Bart Axel’s argument with Sullivan on Christmas Day, and his threat to close New Hope.

“Who this Light Eyes you call Sullivan?” Black Otter asked in Crow.

“He live at New Hope. Miss Molly likes him. He work all day. Where he came from, they say he was like law. He hang men who steal horses.”

Black Otter stiffened. “He hang Indians?”

Two Leggings shook his head. “No, Father. He hang white men.”

“Good.”

Crow were the best horse thieves in the world. Or used to be. But times were changing for them. The buffalo were disappearing, the great herds cut in two by the railroad. The last time Black Otter took a hunting party out, they’d ridden for half a moon without seeing a single herd. Instead, they found piles of buffalo hides stacked high as a man beside the tracks, killed by white buffalo hunters. Sickened by the slaughter of the great herds – a slaughter undertaken to drive the Indians out – B lack Otter ordered every pile they found set afire.

Fifteen years before, on the saddest day of his life, he’d made his mark on the treaty paper – a paper he could not read – and gave his solemn word the Crow would stay within boundaries drawn by the white man. But twice the blue soldiers came with their wagons and moved his people. Twice Black Otter had led a line of Crows that stretched behind him. Weeping women rode horses dragging travois loaded with tipis and household goods. Sullen braves and husbands rode silently alongside.

The government promised him the move to the Agency near Repton and bordering New Hope would be the last. They gave him another piece of paper. But from the very beginning, Black Otter knew the boundaries on the paper were wrong. Part of the land the orphanage claimed as theirs belonged to the Crow Nation. Five square miles on New Hope’s northern border was Crow land, a chimney-shaped tract, over three thousand acres of holy land.

Miss Molly read the treaty and said he was right. Twice she sent him with his paper to Fort Keogh. And each time he came back with promises that confused him and more papers with writing on it that meant nothing to him.

The morning after his last trip to Fort Keogh, the chief showed up at New Hope. Beside him stood his two little sons, Red Cloud and Two Leggings, all three of them wearing buckskins. Knowing not one word of English, both boys crowded next to their father, big eyed and silent.

“You teach them read and write you language?” Black Otter asked Miss Molly, his lips tight with embarrassment.

“Of course I will. And they are very welcome.” Molly had smiled and taken the boys and their father inside.

Now, in Black Otter’s lodge, Two Leggings continued speaking, pulling his father back to the present.

“Iron Hair no like Sullivan. No like Crow,” Two Leggings said in English. “Iron Hair say we bad. He tell Miss Molly stop teaching us or he close school.”

Two Leggings’s small face clouded. His dark eyes met his father’s. “What ‘red scum’ mean?”

A muscle flicked in Black Otter’s cheek. “Iron Hair call you that?”

The boy nodded. “And Sullivan throw him out.”

“What then?”

The boy shrugged. “Iron Hair say Sullivan is dead man. Why he say that? Sullivan not dead.”

Not yet
, Black Otter thought.

He rose and pulled a heavy buffalo robe around his shoulders. Ruffling his son’s hair, he walked Two Leggings to the door of the lodge. With a faint smile he said, “Send Little Turtle to me.”

The chief went back to the fire and waited for his best warrior.

DECEMBER 27, 1884

When Luke started out the next morning, the sky was a hazy, milky gray, deepening to a dirty lead color at the horizon.

Cold air sifted in around his collar, around his wrists, and up his sleeves. Snow coming. He could smell it. The fullness in the air filled his nostrils and coated the back of his throat. Six to ten inches by morning, for sure.

Riding loose and free in the saddle, he headed out to the open range. He could ride like this for hours, then swing off easily without so much as a kink in a muscle and get on with whatever he’d come to do.

He wasn’t more than a mile from the house when he caught a quick darting from the corner of his eye, like the flash of a deer in the woods, a blur of movement, there and gone almost before it registered in his mind. And then later, as he waded Bugle across a half-frozen stream, the soft crunch of a pinecone sounded behind him. He slipped his Winchester rifle from the saddle sling and cocked it. Tense, alert, he hipped around, scanning the line of cottonwoods and underbrush along the bank.

Fox? Bear?

Or Indian? The little hairs lifted on the back of his neck.

Luke sat motionless, scarcely breathing, straining to listen. Nothing but the quiet gurgle of water on the rocks at his feet. Yet the eerie feeling of watching eyes persisted. Whatever or whoever was out there was as still as he. A few minutes later, Luke clucked his tongue and took Bugle into the stream.

New Hope’s range began a mile from the house, stretching south to the foothills of the Red Lion Mountains, the boundary they shared with the Crow reservation. To the west, toward Billings, the land was open pasture, a snowy, empty plain that stretched for miles. In the spring it would be belt-high with sweet blue grama grass, stretching as far as he could see, waving in the wind like a wheat field.

Half a dozen small streams crisscrossed it. As far back as he could remember, New Hope had got low on water only once. The other herds seemed to know it and kept drifting down. Years before, New Hope had fenced it off to keep out the other brands – mainly Axel’s. If they hadn’t, X-Bar-L steers would have grazed New Hope’s grass to the roots.

Overhead, a couple of buzzards spiraled lazily. His eyes skimmed the empty pastures. New Hope’s herd was smaller than he ever remembered, which meant he had to sit down with Molly and the books. In the summer, the herd ran around fifteen hundred head, she’d told him, and said they sold five hundred steers annually in good times. He’d thought he’d find maybe six or seven hundred cows being wintered, but he saw nothing like that many out here. Could be reasons for that, he told himself, like winter kill or disease. He hoped so, but deep down, something seemed wrong. It niggled at him, wouldn’t let him alone – the same feeling he’d had in Lewistown when he discovered three percent of Granville Stuart’s herd had been stolen.

Luke flicked the reins and rode forward slowly, his eyes soaking in every detail. Under Bugle’s hooves, the frozen grass rustled like dry straw, and the farther he rode, the deeper the lines dug into his forehead. In several places, the fence was down, the wire trampled into the snow.

Near an outcropping of rock, Luke spotted another leaning post and a break in the wire. He wound the reins around the saddle horn and swung off. Squatting on his haunches, he picked up the strands of wire and shook his head. The fence wasn’t broken. It was cut.

Two more hours of fence riding disclosed nothing new. Oddly, despite the cut fence, he found not one X-Bar-L cow on New Hope land. Was it possible Axel wasn’t involved? He headed home, his brain calculating, sorting the facts. If there was a thread of logic tying it all together somewhere, he hadn’t found it yet.

Before he was halfway home, snow began falling, big, thick flakes sticking immediately to everything they touched. Luke turned up the sheepskin collar on his jacket and tucked his chin in. He needed to talk to Scully Anders.

The barn, a big two-story structure with a gambrel roof and weather vanes, sat at the foot of a small slope, enclosed by a small corral and a fenced five-acre pasture. Scully was inside the barn mending a harness in one of the tack rooms.

Good man
, Luke thought. New Hope was lucky to have him. Until Luke came back, he’d practically run the place, overseeing the help, keeping track of the cattle. It was he who bought the bulls, did the branding, ran the roundups. And it was Scully who told Molly when and how many boys he needed to help.

Luke had seen three of the older boys riding with Scully and the other men almost every day since he’d been back.

Growing up, he’d done the same, but it was more like training then, a part of their schooling. There had always been a cowboy around, someone to teach a gangly kid how to rope and shoot and break a horse. When they left there, every one of them could get a job on any ranch in the territory. But from what Luke had seen, most of the boys were cleaning barns and shoveling manure, mending fences. Nothing wrong with that, except it wasn’t training. That was yardman’s work. Molly wanted better for her boys.

He swung down and led Bugle inside the barn. In the dusky light, the pungent odor of manure and hay and animals clung, sweet-sour, in his nostrils. Head high, the big gray stood patiently while Luke unfastened the cinch, lifted off the heavy saddle, and threw it across a partition between two stalls. When he pulled the blanket off, a slight steam rose from the horse’s back.

“Mighty fine animal you got there,” Scully said, watching Luke rub the sweat and mud off the deep chest with a gunnysack. “What do you call him?”

“Bugle. He was part of my remuda at Stuart’s. Grant let me buy him when I left. I wasn’t about to leave him up there.” Luke grinned self-consciously, embarrassed to admit how much he liked his horse. Affectionately, he smoothed his hand down Bugle’s flank. The horse’s muscles rippled in response.

“He’s a big one – stallion, too – so how come you ain’t wearing spurs?” Scully asked.

“I don’t with him. He’s a sweet horse. Sometimes I think this critter reads my mind. Move over there.” Luke thumped the heavy shoulder out of the way.

Bugle swung his head around and glanced inquiringly at Luke, then did as he was told and hoofed sideways.

“Get him around a mare in season, and I bet you’ll wish you had spurs. Sure is a big one. If he was mine, I’d geld him, ’specially one that size.”

“I will if I have to, but I’d like a colt out of him first. I’ve been riding horses all my life, and he’s the smartest one I’ve ever had – the only one I’d ever trust. Twice one winter up at Stuart’s, we got caught in a blizzard and had to lie in the snow together. Bugle lay on his side, his back to the wind. I crawled between his legs against his belly, and threw a blanket over us. We kept each other warm until the storm passed.”

Scully’s eyebrows raised. “I never had one I’d do that with – never. Weren’t you afraid he’d roll on you?”

Luke shook his head. “I was more afraid of freezing to death.”

With long, brisk strokes, Luke began rubbing down the stallion’s powerful front legs, and Bugle came as close to purring as a horse ever could. “Where’s all the help gone to around here?” he asked.

“Ain’t but six cowhands here anymore,” Scully said. “Others kind of drifted off this past year. Most of them stayed long as they could, but the board’s cutting back on the money.”

“Who’s on the board this year?”

“Same ones as always: businessmen in Repton, the bank president, a preacher, and other stockmen who use this range, including Axel. They all donate to keep this place running.”

Under a battered brown cowboy hat, Scully’s face was wind-burned and roughened, his cheeks showing a stubble of beard beginning to gray. Forty-odd years of squinting into the sun had etched permanent crow’s-feet around his eyes. He held a black bridle rein, straightening it, smoothing it with the heel of his hand.